Boom Boom
by skullanddog
Summary: Reno and Rude find themselves trapped in a room with a bomb. The end is nigh!


_Turks! Yay! This takes place around the same time as FF7. I know by mentioning Elena and AVALANCHE in the same story, it's a little non-canon. Verdot is the former leader of the Turks, and his cameo in this is also a little non-canon.  
Oh! Get over it! It's not that bad. WASCO and it's related dickheads belong to me, but nothing else you see here. Aww. _

Green_ with a capital is used to signify AVALANCE, eco-terrorists that they are._

He was a little quirky.

The bam bam bam of blood in his ears kept perfect sync with the slap of his boot against the concrete. He moved in jerks, never falling out of rhythm with the beat in his brain.

When he spoke the words were fractured into syllables.

"Open this door! Don't be so ri-goddamn-diculous!"

Rude watched him without watching him, both staring at him and at the wall beyond. The barest shadow of a half starved smile flickered at the corner of his mouth. It was the kind of expression where if you called it an expression at all, you'd gone overboard.

He didn't join Reno's assault on the door. Rude knew they were stuck here, right as rain. He knew Reno knew it too, by the furtive glances the other man gave the black box.

Black box. Hah. It was a bomb, a black and malignant vulture in the far corner of the storeroom. There was twenty six minutes left on the counter. Rude wasn't game nor stupid enough to touch it.

"Will they be here, man?"

Bam bam bam. Reno gave a disgruntled snort, disgusted by his own fear. Bada-bang bada-boom. Adrenaline jack-hammered through him. His heart fluttered like some caged thing.

Hell, it was a caged thing. It was caged right there in his chest, pounding itself bloody again the stack of his ribs in protest of being part of Reno when Reno was twelve feet away from a ticking bomb.

"They'll be here."

Rude lowered himself to the concrete floor. The cold of it soaked right through his suit pants, clinging like ice to the sensitive skin on his thighs.

He kept his face carefully blank, watching the bomb through half closed eyes. There were bits of him that screamed and cowered in blind animal terror of the thing across the room, but the momentous outer casing of Rude was not one of them.

Reno's eyes flicked to the bomb. It ticked. Most bombs nowa-days didn't tick, all electronic, don't 'cha know. Those goddamn eco-terrorist bastards probably made this one tick 'specially for him. Tick tock tick tock. In time with his thumping boot and thundering pulse.

It got to him.

"Those whale-loving green bastards!"

Rude cringed. Reno's boot struck the steel door again. The sound was a dull clang, but it made him wince like a lover's tongue on a twitching nerve.

"There ain't gonna be enough left of ya to save a goddamn tadpole when I get outta here!" Reno pounded the door with his boot, in infallible timing with the ticking bomb, "You miserable sonza bitches! Cowards! When I get outta here!"

He let the sentence hang. Rude glanced at him, amused. _If_ they got out, he thought.

In his slow, unimaginative sort of way, Rude found their situation ironic. If Reno hadn't been so wound-up, he would have shared the sentiment.

The pair of them had been planting plastic explosives in the building's basement car park, when AVALANCHE showed up. At five am on a Saturday morning, in the squeaky clean part of town. It didn't take a mind more romantic than Rude's to figure out they'd been set up.

"We weren't killin' no starving children or goddamn whales! What in the Cetra's Holy name is up with them?"

Tick. Rude could almost hear Reno ticking over.

"I'm _not_ going to die in a freaking store room!" Reno slammed his fist into the door, "And not because of some stupid whale lovers!"

He flicked his pistol from his hip-holster. BANG BANG BANG. Three rounds through the door's narrow glass panel. There was a second where he was deafened to even his own pulse, then it came roaring back with the sloshing thunder of a waterfall.

He wasn't afraid. He _wasn't_. But he needed to move. He needed to hit something more responsive than a smug iron door.

"Hey, man." Rude said, his careful expression strained.

The shots had to hit something out there in that concrete jungle. They wouldn't just shatter the glass panel and drop down, inert. Rude wondered if AVALANCHE had bothered to disarm the plastic explosive he and Reno had placed.

He doubted it. The explosives were molded perfectly into the plugholes drilled into the building's support pillars. Rude used his palm to rub the sheen of sweat from his forehead.

Those pillars were so thick and so white, Reno always said they reminded him of fat ladies half fallen through the first floor, with only their pale, fleshy legs left wriggling below.

Placing plastic explosive was as simple as drilling the hole, putting the plastic in, and dabbing it with a little talcum powder. No one just glancing at the columns would ever pick it out. Just a concealed varicose vein on the fat lady's leg.

"They'll be here, man." Rude repeated. His stomach quivered horribly as he spoke.

The drilling had left both he and Reno covered in cement dust. Toxic white cement dust. Rude had heard once that breathing in too much dust could kill a man.

He brushed at the power on his jacket, only succeeding in rubbing it in further.

"I'm going to kill them all." Reno muttered. He shoved his pistol back in its holster, drumming his fingers on the black metal as he did so.

For a foolish instant, Rude thought his partner in arms had calmed down. Reno was like that. One second all easy grins and innuendo, or caterwauling along to Black Sabbath and Gary Glitter, guns blazing the next.

Rude, well, he was always calm. Always quiet, always patient. He appeared to be perpetually waiting, not for any single thing, but just for whatever the world would dish him up. He wasn't dumb, just unimaginative. He could be shy. The ladies lapped it up.

"Ya hear that? I've had it with you green-bellied bastards!"

Reno braced himself against the door, and stuck his head through the high window, now devoid of its glass.

_Tards gards bards_. His words bounced through the empty car park.

"Tseng and Elena will come, man. They know we're here. They'll come." Rude said. He crossed his legs, the picture of Zen. He kept his right hand pressed hard to his thigh to hide the twitch.

Ignoring him, Reno announced, "I can't reach the door handle."

He dropped back to the ground. What he needed was a beer. Beer n' broads n' brawls. That'd take his mind off the one big **B**, the bomb.

"Boom." He said.

Like an abruptly discarded string puppet, he slumped to the floor. Rude regarded him passively. The bomb ticked, big neon counter staining the wall behind it red.

They'd been had. That much was for sure. Those AVALANCHE wankers had known they'd be there, in the freaking WASCO building, on that godforsaken hour where all the bad pubs are closed and the all the good ones are still an hour away from opening.

Besides, who cared if a bunch of WASCO dickheads died? Not Reno. Certainly not those AVALANCHE jerk-offs.

He guessed it was obvious that AVALANCHE didn't care about WASCO. A bomb in the car park wasn't exactly a gesture of good will.

The dust question was starting to get to Rude. He blamed it on the ticking. Tick tock tick. Each second was a slap in the face. And then there was the matter of the Hair.

Not Reno's long ginger hair, which he spun through his fingers, with his eyes set on the bomb. Not Rude's slick-as-a-penguin barren scalp. No, this hair was _the Hair_, a slender, pale grey figure posed like the Grim Reaper on his chin.

The Hair, which foreshadowed the Bags around his eyes and the Promotion to Administration (thankee sai for all yer work on the field, but 'cher looking a little tired there sai, now here, help yerself to some paperwork).

All this came before the Redundancy. Rude had always thought he would die before the Redundancy. They all did. But there was old Tseng, now, he was facing down the barrel of the Redundancy. Not even a knife through the belly and a week of brutal torture had been able to save Tseng from the Redundancy.

Rude coughed. Was it the dust? He felt a jolt of panic run through him. He sucked in oxygen like he could drink it, aiming to disperse the built-up dust in his lungs.

"What's up with you, yo?"

Reno had produced a cigarette from his jacket pocket. One of Tseng's, no doubt. Reno didn't smoke (though he'd considered it, as extra protection against the Redundancy). He just sucked the cigarette butt, dangling it from his lips or clamping it between his teeth, speaking all the while. It never seemed to hinder him.

Mostly he did it to mock Tseng. Smoking was a weakness. Reno didn't care to count the times he'd watched Tseng conduct a board meeting with his hands shaking in a way that was at the same time barely perceptible and overbearingly obvious in want of a cigarette.

Then again, maybe if he hadn't been throwing back two packs of Marlborough and a jug of Reno's own homebrewed _Lady Luck_ a day, Tseng wouldn't shake at all.

"I, uh." Rude blundered into the sentence and stopped. He cut his eyes back to the bomb. He watched the bloody shadow on the wall dance, and squinted to read the counter from his skewed perspective.

Fourteen minutes. Adrenaline hit him like lightning. Rude slumped back against the wall, relaxing in spite of his roaring heartbeat. That was how it went.

The first dozen or so times, adrenaline was horrible. After that it was okay. And years later, years of bombs and underground wars and looming redundancies later, it was a fix. Caffeine, nicotine, adrenaline. Funny how you get used to things.

"Do you uh, do you ever…" Rude felt suddenly stupid. There was a bomb in the room and he was worried about dust. He felt a prickle of heat rush up his face.

The unlit cigarette darted across Reno's nimble fingers. He clamped it between his teeth and glanced at Rude.

"Do I ever think about your sister late at night? You bet I do."

"You better not." Rude said, feigning annoyance. If his sister hadn't learnt to steer clear of Reno by now she deserved to have her heart broken. Reno might have had enough love for a thousand women, but he never had it for long.

"Out with it then, sunshine. We've only got twelve minutes left."

Tick tock. Twelve minutes. Tseng and Elena would be on their way by now.

Wouldn't they?

"Do you…" Rude swallowed that gritty horse-pill called his pride, "Do you ever think about dust?"

Reno drummed his fingers on the concrete floor. He needed to move. Not just because his ass was freezing over. He wanted to bump and shake, get up and get down, boogie, dance, jive, whatever. He wanted to move.

Adrenaline always made him act like a caffeine rehab case. He gave into it, standing. He slapped his hands across his flat belly, in triple time to the ticking bomb. Thump thump TICK thump thump TOCK.

"Rupey man, _why_ would I think about dust?"

"Because I-" Rude looked down. Looked at the bomb. Inspected the cake of blood and talcum powder under his stubs of fingernails. "I got a grey hair."

There, it was out. Though he'd ripped the hair out as soon as he'd spotted it in his tiny bathroom mirror, he felt its ghostly presence. Like an arm lost to war, the memory of it stayed with him.

He scratched his chin absently.

"I'm not real sure I follow you." Reno frowned. He rolled the smoke from one side of his mouth to the other. He beat out drum solos against his ribs, pounding hard enough that Rude knew he was itching for a fight.

"I've got a grey hair, man. M' gettin' old."

Reno made a face like Clint Eastwood staring into a Texas sunset. He said, "Hell, partner, let me get my shotgun. If you care to step 'round the back, I'll put you down the gentle way."

"I mean it, man."

It wasn't so long ago that they warred against Wutai. Not as soldiers, though there were plenty of those, but as children already set up for a life of espionage and assassination. Doing the dirty laundry of a nation that spent a lot of time rolling in mud.

Rude wasn't then twenty, and he was Reno's senior by a year. Blood and booze and women, that's all they ever cared about. They got paid for it. Paid well, too, since they both knew the value of a dollar. So maybe not children. But not much more, either.

He thought of a day, nearing the end of the war, that stood in the centre of Rude's subconsciously divided memories. The divide was between childhood and manhood, and the memory wasn't so much of a wall as a bridge.

They'd been playing seven card poker, a game Tseng had not long ago taught them and one they'd played every Tuesday night since. Old Verdot was in charge of them then, but old Verdot and Tseng had wandered off to play terrier to their superiors, so Rude and Reno had been left to their own devices.

"Pick up or play?"

Rude had played, and he would have won, too. He had a six picture cards, five of them diamonds (he and Reno were notorious cheaters).

It was hot that day, but they'd shut the flap of their canvas tent all the same, to keep out the flies and the fetid stench of shanty civilisation. Half of the invaded Wutai was tigers and yurts, Reno had joked, the other half was baboons and tents.

Before he could claim his win, anyway, the canvas flap had fallen open. Verdot had stood there, blocking the white Wutaiin sun, his face as creased with lines as a piece of origami.

"You two. Guns."

The boys knew this ritual. They scrambled for their guns, laid out with their holsters and jackets on the camp beds. Too hot to wear guns, Rude thought.

At last they stood before him, Rude standing rigid, as though he was an arrow with its nose buried there in the dirt, Reno slouching as he still did, with his shirt tails still virgin of his pants. They'd watched Verdot with hawk eyes and shark grins, trying and failing to keep the excitement from their faces.

Rude thought that Verdot had told them then, but that wasn't right. He'd just stood there, staring right through them. At last Reno had spoken, unable to contain himself.

"Well, boss? What is it?"

Only then had Verdot had looked at him. Verdot moved like a viper. The only reason Rude had known he'd moved at all was because one moment Reno was standing there, bouncing with excitement, right beside him. The next, he was falling back, hitting the ground, droplets of blood trailing in the air after him.

Very suddenly, Rude had noticed the gun in Verdot' hand. He hadn't seen it before. He didn't think it had been there before. Verdot had drawn and struck faster than Rude's young eye could register what he was seeing.

"Get up, Reno. Stand up straight. Listen to me when I give you an order." Verdot' voice was stern, but otherwise uninflected.

Reno had got up, his green eyes blazing. The skin across his left temple and cheek was broken, dripping red, already starting to swell. He made an effort to stand straight, but he was unsteady on his feet.

"That will do. You are to kill Tseng. He has been exposed as a traitor to the nation and a threat to our security. As his confidents, you can excusably approach him close enough to kill him. A gunshot will be sufficient."

Verdot had spoken with an apathy that chilled Rude to the very marrow of his bones. Even as he recalled it, ten years later in that ill fated car park storeroom, he couldn't repress a shudder.

In the canvas tent, boiling as hot as the Wutai sun, Reno had stood beside him. Reno had said things that Rude wasn't and would never be brave enough to say. Rude thought afterwards that maybe his friend was concussed when he spoke.

"We _will not_ kill Tseng! He's just like us! Who cares about the nation? I don't care about it, and I don't care if Tseng's a traitor. I _won't_ kill him."

Verdot' face had seemed to freeze over. Every crag and pit on his dried apricot head had appeared chiseled from stone. Again he lashed out with the gun in his hand, slamming it into Reno's face with a BANG like the crack of a whip.

"Then you too will be branded traitors. You will die alongside Tseng." Verdot' voice adopted an edge of pleading. He had touched Rude's shoulder then, a fatherly gesture that made the boy feel as hollow and brittle as a corn husk. "Don't you see? He will die either way. It is better that you two take care of it."

"No!" Reno was past standing. He had managed to sit up, his face awash with red, pistol cradled against his stomach. Rude had watched him look up at Verdot, that fire still bright through his dimming expression.

"You have no choice."

Then Verdot had fallen back, the last of his words still lingering on his thin lips. Rude had stared at the gun in his hand, his own hand, Rupey Falkone's hand. He was shaking like a heroin addict.

He felt like he'd just shot his mother.

Killing never bothered them. Maybe it would have, Rude thought, if they hadn't been raised to do it. Maybe they would have had second thoughts if they money wasn't so good.

Back then, with Verdot staring wide and empty-eyed at the blue sky, a smoking bullet hole in his chest, with Reno lapsing in and out of coherent thought, Rude found his own private hell.

He'd carried Verdot into the tent, laid him on one of the camp beds. Like maybe be just had a headache. Didn't the heat give them all headaches? Then he'd sat on the ground beside Reno, and taken his hand while Reno shook and muttered mad things and bled all over him.

_Bang bang bang_. His pulse had been more like the report from a shotgun than just blood sloshing in his ears. Rude remembered clutching that freckled hand in his. He guessed a lot of time passed. He expected to die, for he and Reno both to be branded traitors and hung.

He had never thought he would die before that day. It was less of a coming into adulthood than it was a lesson in his own mortality.

So like a child he seized Reno's hand in his and when, a long time later, Tseng had walked in as alive as life itself, Rude had let go. He explained things, in his stammering, slow sort of way, nudging Reno with his shoulder the entire time to rouse him.

They wouldn't hang, Tseng promised. This was exactly the sort of thing the nation wanted to see in their young men. Tseng himself had been busy destroying what records he could find that marked him as a traitor.

A productive day all round.

Rude had never held another man's hand since that day. And back in his own time, as a person both far removed and exactly the same as the one he'd been in Wutai, a muscle spasmed in his fingers.

He squeezed it with his left hand, and looked up at Reno. Reno had some sixth sense about being stared at, and he jittered and jived, shuffling his feet. His eyes were fixed on the door.

"Man." He said, like this covered everything that could possibly need saying on the subject of Rude's grey hair.

He was moving in time to the tick. His hips swayed, and he tossed his head back, taking an imaginary drag on his stolen cigarette.

"What should I do?" Rude implored to the room in general.

It was a hypothetical question, he supposed. He would do what his ol' Pa did, of course, and rub some boot polish into his beard each morning, then spend the rest of the day pretending he didn't smell like Doc Martins.

He knew there was more modern methods than boot polish (hair dye came to mind) but his pride would never let him submit to them.

Eight minutes.

Rude felt his heartbeat quicken. Not much time.

"No stripper in a birthday cake, huh?" Reno tipped his head to the bomb. He flashed his usual easy grin.

No surprise party, either. Rude didn't bother answering.

"I got some _Lady Luck_ on the distiller back home. Gonna burn away to fumes the way we're going."

That ambiguous statement was about the closest Reno had so far come to admitting that he wasn't prepared to die.

"We've been closer." Rude said, replying to the sentiment, rather than the statement.

Hips still swaying, eyes set on the ceiling, Reno didn't give him a reply. He was thinking too hard about just how entirely he was going to annihilate every last one of those AVALANCHE assholes. Even if he had to do it as a ghost.

"Just wish it'd been someone else to get us in the end," he said suddenly, and loudly, like he'd intended to say something completely different, "Not the goddamn whale humpers."

"I wish we'd shot Tseng."

Reno grinned at the joke, if that's what it was. It was always a little difficult to tell with Rude. He had a brain like a planet; huge, complex, but eternally slow. Reno had joked once that man had walked three times around the moon before Rude had ever glanced up at the sky.

"Hell yeah," Reno gave a short, sly laugh, "He deserves shooting for leaving it this late. We couldn't even get out of the building in six minutes."

The next four minutes were passed in silence. Rude sank back against the wall and counted down the seconds in his head. Reno flung his cigarette to the ground, crushed it with his boot.

They stared at each other. Two minutes.

Reno, as usual, broke the silence.

"I wish you were a woman."

Die the way you live, Rude guessed.

"In fact, I wish you were Tseng. Or Elena. Or a freaking AVALANCHE jerk-off. Anyone who could stop that GODDAMN TICKING!"

He crossed the room to the bomb. The bomb itself, like the circling buzzard, never changed. It didn't tremble in anticipation or grow louder with each passing TICK. That was just Rude's rarely aired imagination.

"You stupid Green idiots! That tick is driving me insane! Why'd ya make it tick?!" Reno shouted. He lashed out at the bomb with his boot.

BANG.

He struck it hard. The bomb dropped its black casing like a man who'd taken a kick to the groin. Rude craned his head to get a better view of the bomb. Might as well see what was going to kill them. Just a thick jumbled of red and green wires, built up in the classic ice-cream cone shape of a high-grade electric time bomb.

Rude found himself wishing he hadn't skipped bomb-demolition training. He ought to write and complain that the training centre had been built right around the corner from a strip joint. And not just any strip joint, _Boobastic_. How could any man be expected make responsible decisions when _Boobastic_ was in his face?

He cringed when Reno shouted, full volume, high pitch,

"You AVALANCHE ASSHOLES!!"

Reno kicked the bomb again, face flushed. Rude raised his head cautiously. His comrade was leaning over the exposed bomb, long red hair falling over his face. His expression was at once furious and grim.

"What's up?" Rude asked the obvious question. What wasn't up?

"Those goddamn flower pickin' mother loving jerk-offs!" Reno announced at last. He jumped to his feet and strode, not dancing now, back to the door.

Thirty seconds.

Reno drew his gun and fired another round through the window.

"What, man?"

"The tick, man! _The GODDAMN tick_!"

BANG BANG BANG. Another three rounds. Another three wild shots into a minefield of plastic explosive.

Rude's pulse hammered in his ears. His heart fluttered. He was almost more afraid of his comrad than of the deflowered black box.

Eyes flashing, Reno turned on him. He waved the pistol at the bomb.

"Man," he said, and his voice was low and calm enough that Rude knew the end was nigh, "It's an alarm clock."

Zero seconds.

Nothing. A heartbeat passed. Not that Rude's heart was beating. It was petrified in his chest.

_'Bing-bong bing-bong!'_

"Boom boom." Reno said.

Cautiously, Rude climbed to his feet. He inched across the room, arms crossed tightly, as though to keep himself anchored to his body.

He peered into the bomb.

Cushioned like a baby on a nest of red and green wires, sat a plump alarm clock. It had two gold bells at the top which rattled together in a merry 'bing-bong, bing-bong'.

"I hate those Green bastards." Reno muttered. He was back at work on the door. Even if Tseng and Elena didn't show up, Reno would have the door open within the hour. Just in time for the pubs to open.

As for AVALANCHE, Rude had never liked them more.

_Please review!_

_Author is prepared to work for pocky, but reviews are preferable!_

_No, __**you **__learn to spell._

_Thank you and good night!_


End file.
